ROCKFORD, IL — Fourth-year medical student Cheyenne Carr said she has wanted to be a family doctor for as long as she can remember, even if many of her fellow students tend to lean toward other specialties that can sometimes mean more money.
Carr, 26, is from El Paso and has a degree in molecular and cellular biology from University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. She said a family doctor can care for anyone. He or she is the family’s primary care physician who can build trust and strong relationships for years to come
“You have to know a little about everything,” Carr said. “And you are taking care of infants, to children to geriatrics and everything in between and coordinating all that care. You might refer them to a specialist but you still want to be there to answer questions, there to talk them through what is going on and so that’s a hard job.”
Carr was one of two students recently inducted into the University of Illinois College of Medicine Rockford’s Integrated Family Medicine Residency Program. The innovative program is designed to reduce the shortage of primary care physicians and family doctors in the Rockford area.
The program is backed by a $172,500 Community Foundation of Northern Illinois grant over three years. It gives two medical students a year a $15,000 stipend each, serving as a financial incentive to stay in Rockford after graduation for residency training. As part of the program, they are introduced into the residency clinical setting during their final year of medical school and then complete their residency in Rockford.
With 279,194 primary care physicians in the U.S. in 2022, the National Center for Health Workforce Analysis estimated there will be a shortage of 87,150 family doctors nationwide by 2037. The shortage will be worse in non-metro areas.
How many more doctors Rockford needs isn’t clear.
But Dr. Rhonda Verzal, director of the College of Medicine program, said the shortage can be seen in the health outcomes in the Rockford region. According to the Winnebago County Health Department, Winnebago County ranks 88th of Illinois’ 102 counties for good health, Verzal said.
Too often, Rockford area residents can’t find a primary care doctor, Verzal said. Once they find one accepting new patients, it can take as long as six months to get an appointment with a new doctor. In the meantime, patients can wind up in an emergency room, putting extra burdens on the hospital systems.
“The morbidity and complexity of the medical problems people in our county are suffering from, we are falling toward one of the sickest in the state of Illinois,” Verzal said. “If conditions can’t be addressed, patients will continue to get sicker. Their diabetes will continue to progress, they will develop kidney failure and further complications of other disease processes instead of being able to treat them from the beginning and diagnose them right off the bat.”
Fourth-year medical student Laura Berger, who grew up on a dairy farm near Lenzburg said her father is a big reason she is determined to become a family doctor.
Berger and Carr are the sixth and seventh medical students to enter the residency program since it began in 2023.
“My dad was diagnosed with a heart murmur caught by a family medicine doctor,” said Berger, who has a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences from the Southern Illinois University. “My dad is kind of a typical, stubborn farmer who didn’t believe anything was wrong. His family medicine doctor went above and beyond to make sure he got the care he needed. He eventually had heart surgery that saved his life.”
Jeff Kolkey writes about government, economic development and other issues for the Rockford Register Star. He can be reached via email at jkolkey@rrstar.com and on X @jeffkolkey.
This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: The doctor shortage in Rockford is real. These students want to be part of the solution
Reporting by Jeff Kolkey, Rockford Register Star / Rockford Register Star
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